Source: San Francisco Chronicle
By James Palmer, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Nabil Comanny and his family endured the dead bodies left to decompose along the road to their southern Dora neighborhood. They accepted the criminal gangs that roamed the area, searching for kidnap victims. And neither the utility failures nor the mountains of trash in the street could drive them away.
As Christians, the Comannys had learned to keep a low profile. They even stayed in their home after many Muslim neighbors fled the daily chaos when sectarian bloodshed broke out between Shiite and Sunni militants in 2006, turning Dora into one of Baghdad's most embattled districts.
But the hand-scrawled note at their door was the last straw. The message commanded the family to select one of three options: Convert to Islam; pay a fee of nearly $300 monthly for "protection" or leave. Failure to comply would result in death.
By James Palmer, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Nabil Comanny and his family endured the dead bodies left to decompose along the road to their southern Dora neighborhood. They accepted the criminal gangs that roamed the area, searching for kidnap victims. And neither the utility failures nor the mountains of trash in the street could drive them away.
As Christians, the Comannys had learned to keep a low profile. They even stayed in their home after many Muslim neighbors fled the daily chaos when sectarian bloodshed broke out between Shiite and Sunni militants in 2006, turning Dora into one of Baghdad's most embattled districts.
But the hand-scrawled note at their door was the last straw. The message commanded the family to select one of three options: Convert to Islam; pay a fee of nearly $300 monthly for "protection" or leave. Failure to comply would result in death.
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"We don't have weapons, and the government doesn't protect us. What else can we do?" said Comanny, a 37-year-old journalist whose family abandoned their modest home of 11 years in April.
Islamic militants are increasingly targeting Christians in Iraq, especially in the nation's capital, according to interviews with residents, church officials and aid groups. As a result, the Christian community - long a minority in a Muslim country - continues to dwindle.
While meaningful numbers are difficult to come by - the last Iraqi census in 1987, counted 1 million Christians - many Christians fled Iraq after the United Nations imposed economic sanctions in the 1990s. Today, aid groups estimate between 300,000 and 600,000 Christians remain out of an estimated 25 million inhabitants.
Comanny said the first sign of trouble began last spring after Muslim militants imposed Islamic law in Dora. The proclamation came via an 18-point document posted along shops and blast walls. The decree listed stringent rules for all residents, including requiring women to wear the head-to-toe burqa.
"It's not our tradition," Comanny said. "How can Christian women be expected to do this?"
In the end, most Christian families decided to pay the hefty monthly bribe to Islamic militants that allowed them to stay in the neighborhood, Comanny said, "because it gave them time to prepare to leave. But most can't afford to keep paying."
Comanny, who shared a small house in Dora with his mother, three brothers and four sisters, finally moved on the advice of a lifelong acquaintance he called a sympathetic insurgent. Since militants in Dora frequently attack families returning home to fetch their belongings, Comanny paid his contact $800 for safe passage from the neighborhood.
Today, the Comannys live in the southeast New Baghdad section of the capital with hundreds of other displaced Christian families. The families move cautiously among a majority Shiite population who rely on protection provided by the Mahdi Army headed by the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Christians living in Dora say they once mixed easily with Muslims, sharing cookies at Christmas and joining Muslim neighbors for dinner during Iftar - the sunset feast breaking the daily sunrise-to-sunset fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
Amer Awadish, a 47-year-old taxi driver, said such relationships saved his life. After a handwritten note was delivered to his apartment in December ordering him and his wife, Samia, 48, to leave within two days, a lifelong neighbor appeared at his door. The man, Awadish said, advised him to leave immediately.
"This man used to kiss my mother on the forehead in public," Awadish said, referring to a common gesture of respect toward elderly women. "He was too ashamed to kill me because of that."
In addition to direct threats, Iraq's Christians must also cope with more subtle obstacles.
William Warda, the founder of Hamorabi, a Christian-led national human rights group in Iraq, said most Christians in Baghdad no longer feel safe embracing the lifestyle they once enjoyed.
"They can't drink alcohol, or even dress in the fashion they're accustomed," Warda said. "Maybe they can stand this for a year or two, but not their whole lives."
Most Christians who have remained in Iraq are Chaldean Catholics who acknowledge the pope's authority but remain sovereign from the Vatican. Other denominations include Syrian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholics. Small groups of Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics also practice their religion, as do Anglicans and Evangelicals.
But a common thread among most of these groups is a concern that church leaders are not speaking out about their rights.
Christian churches are "not defending us. This is part of the problem," said Bashar Jamil John, 24, an engineering student at Baghdad Technical Institute.
The Chaldean Catholic patriarch, Emmanuel Delly, who is also the Vatican's representative in Iraq, declined to be interviewed. But Rev. Mokhlous Shasha, 32, a first-year priest at the Lady of Our Salvation Syrian Catholic Church in central Baghdad, said the clergy is just as threatened as the people they serve. Since 2006, militants have killed two priests - a Catholic and a Greek Orthodox - and a Protestant minister. They have also kidnapped at least 10 others, church officials say.
"Priests live in the same situations as their parishioners," said Shasha, who said he never walks the streets of Baghdad wearing his priest collar.
Many Christians also agree that their future in Baghdad is bleak.
At least a dozen churches have closed, and several seminaries and nunneries have moved to the more stable Kurdish region in the north. For those whose doors remain open, attendance is down by more than half, church leaders say.
As a result, Warda of the Christian-led human rights group predicts a mass exodus from Iraq once Western countries relax their immigration policies.
"If the U.S. and Europe open their doors, the Christians in Iraq will be finished," Warda predicted. "They will all leave."